LogInUnreal Engine doesn't solve all your problems.
Bethesda
Bethesda sticks to its Creation Engine, and although it was improved for Starfield, some players think it's outdated and should be dropped in favor of Unreal Engine 5. However, it's not that easy, according to former studio lead Dan Nanni, who explained why the studio keeps its games on its proprietary engine.
In an interview with VideoGamer, he explained that it's not that easy to jump from one engine to another. Considering the depth of Bethesda's games, it would have to rebuild a lot, as Unreal Engine doesn't simply give you a ready solution for all your problems.
“If you wanna throw away your engine and restart, you have to go through the whole entirety of restarting,” he said. “Unreal doesn’t give you everything out of the box, you have to build it. If you went Unreal’s golden path, then yes, you have a dedicated team at Unreal who’s supporting you. But when you’re making a very specific game in a very specific way, with the systems that were built in a way that people are familiar with, it means you have to make changes fundamentally, it means you’re no longer on the golden path.”
Nanni added that to keep the open-ended structure, reliance on physics, and focus on extreme modding, Bethesda would need to basically create a new engine altogether. Unreal doesn’t give developers everything and has its own issues that players might not appreciate.
“Next thing you know, you’re still dealing with building an engine,” he explained. “The important question is whether you gain the benefit of the future, that’s the question to ask. You’re not asking about the game that you’re going to launch right now, you’re also asking the question of the game you’re going to launch five, six, seven years from now. Is that going to benefit from that as well?”
Bethesda
Creation Engine 2 is a major step forward from its predecessor. While it's a new version of Creation Engine, just like Unreal Engine 5 is an iteration of Unreal Engine 4, there are huge differences.
“If you start looking at what is Unreal Engine 5 vs the original Unreal, even down to its level design principles, they’re completely opposite. That’s just time for you. But you genuinely throw it away from scratch and start over again: if you did so, you wouldn’t call it 5, 4, 3, 2, you’d call it something brand-new.”
Bethesda's games have some common problems, such as the infamous loading screens, which are still present in Starfield. Its former lead designer Bruce Nesmith called them “a necessary bane of the existing of Bethesda since time immemorial,” but in reality, it's most likely an engine issue. Alas, you can't just up and go to another tool.
“There’s a lot of people there who’ve worked there for like 20, 25 years… even if you go into Unreal, you gotta take your whole technology department. And you’ve got to now train them into learning all this. That’s a lot of time. However long it takes you to make it, you have to ask yourself, are you going to buy that time back in order to make that transition?” Nanni said.
However, he thinks the switch is inevitable because “engines atrophy after a certain point, engines leak too much, you’re building on a codebase which is decades old and it has to move away from it at one point.”
This might pose a problem for modders, Nanni believes, who are used to Creation, but I'm sure they will manage and swiftly learn new tools.
Meanwhile, CD Projekt, the developer of Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher, has already moved to Unreal Engine 5 and says it doesn't mean starting from scratch. So perhaps Bethesda will get the courage one day as well.
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